BobVigneault
Bawberator
UPDATE! The Rebuttal. Help my friend answer college hostility.
Click to go to rebuttal here.
Every Saturday morning I have coffee and fellowship with one of my dearest friends at a coffee shop. In an hour and a half we discuss reformed theology and solve the worlds problems. My friend, Dave Heesen, is a reformed Baptist and is the head of Secretarial Services at Beloit College - a lone Calvinist in a post modern bastion of liberal morals and politics. Recently he wrote two letters to the school newspaper answering proposals for banning Christian literature from a crisis pregnancy center and the handing out of condoms to solve the aids problem.
The response he received was complete with strawman arguments and hostility toward a Biblical presupposition. If any of you have the time to help out my brother, I'm publishing the entire response from the editor here and would greatly appreciate any tips or tacts on how Dave should reply to Mr. Harrison. I would love to tell Dave, "Here are some suggestions from the greatest reformed thinkers in the world." Thanks.
Click to go to rebuttal here.
Every Saturday morning I have coffee and fellowship with one of my dearest friends at a coffee shop. In an hour and a half we discuss reformed theology and solve the worlds problems. My friend, Dave Heesen, is a reformed Baptist and is the head of Secretarial Services at Beloit College - a lone Calvinist in a post modern bastion of liberal morals and politics. Recently he wrote two letters to the school newspaper answering proposals for banning Christian literature from a crisis pregnancy center and the handing out of condoms to solve the aids problem.
The response he received was complete with strawman arguments and hostility toward a Biblical presupposition. If any of you have the time to help out my brother, I'm publishing the entire response from the editor here and would greatly appreciate any tips or tacts on how Dave should reply to Mr. Harrison. I would love to tell Dave, "Here are some suggestions from the greatest reformed thinkers in the world." Thanks.
Beloit College Round Table 12/10/2007
Mr. Heesen - use your brain, not your bible by Steve Harrison, Editor-in-chief
First let us examine a few of “god’s laws” and then we’ll approach the bible as a source of morality This is a list of IN CONTEXT bible quotes assembled by my brother and me over the past year (some parts underlined for emphasis).
In support of slavery:
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
When a man strikes his slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)
The inferiority of women:
You wives will submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of his body, the church; he gave his life to be her Savior. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives must submit to your husbands in everything. (Ephesians 5:22-24 NLT)
Women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes,, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty (I Timothy, chapter 2 NAB)
Punishment for rape victims:
If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to the girl because she did not cry out for help though the was in the city and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)
Kill a woman on her wedding night if she does not have proof of virginity:
But if this charge is true (that she wasn’t a virgin on her wedding night), and evidence of the girl’s virginity is not found, they shall bring the girl to the entrance of her fathers house and there her townsman shall stone her to death, because she committed a crime against Israel by her unchasteness in her father’s house. Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 22:20-21 NAB)
The sun stops in the sky (otherwise known as the sun moves around the Earth):
The sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies. (Joshua 10:13)
Eye for an eye, hand for a testicle:
If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)
If kids mock you, send bears to eat them:
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. (II Kings 2:23-24)
While the bible explicitly says that slavery is acceptable, women are inferior to men, and that rape victims should be stoned to death, I never came across a passage that said “thou shall not abort an embryo” or “evolution is a lie perpetuated by heretics.” I find it odd that people like Mr. Heesen want everyone to fall in line with god’s teachings when they refer to things that are inferred, though not expressly stated, in the bible. The rules of morality that are clearly written in the bible seem monstrous to any rational person (see page 6) yet are never touted by people like Mr. Heesen, and I challenge him to try and support any one of the laws stated above. I mean, I would dislike being mocked by youths or receiving a blow to my testicles but I would never respond by killing the children or cutting off a woman’s hand, like our oh-so-moral god would have us do. If god were running for president, the bible would be his voting record — would you support a candidate with those kinds of skeletons in their closet?
Then why do so many people want us to follow these laws if they reflect an outdated, uneducated, sickly version of morality? Because it is a convenient replacement for reasoned thought that adds immediate weight behind an argument. Some bible-phile has an agenda and wants support, so they claim that god is on their side and POOF!, instant solidarity.
Our society evolves over time. Guided by science and a sense of true morality, we have slowly learned that women are equal to men, slavery is deplorable, and that the sun does not revolve around the Earth. Over time ideas that are initially labeled as heretical eventually become common sense. In the next century I am confident that oppressing gays will be as distasteful as segregation, abortion will not be equated to murder (most people will differentiate between a collection of cells and a breathing, thinking human being), and evolution will be regarded in the same way as gravity — as truth. A staunch anchoring to these religious ideas simply slows progress, it cannot stop it.
Think long and hard for yourself, Mr. Heesen. Many people would agree with you that the number of sexually active young people has its consequences, but why tarnish your argument by siding with a school of thought that supports the death penalty for being raped?
‘With that said, let’s leave the religion out of this and debate this like rational people. You said that our school distributing condoms was comparable to giving matches to a child. The implication of this statement is that distributing condoms is an endorsement and enabler of reckless premarital sex. Though you do not explicitly say this, I can infer then that you are in favor of promoting abstinence until marriage in place of condom distribution.
At the onset of puberty teenagers receive a hormonal push to have sex. This is an evolved mechanism that screams “I AM NOW PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF MAKING A BABY!” and unfortunately evolution was rather careless and neglected to compensate for human society Though young people are driven to copulate, they are for the most part unequipped to deal with some of the potential consequences of said copulation (babies, STDs). Logically, the safest bet is to abstain from sex until marriage and limit mating to that marriage. Unfortunately, the hor¬monal influx doesn’t care about logic — it just screams a singular message. This is why abstinence-only programs do not work.
The Bush administration has been a large supporter of abstinence-only programs, which received more than $176 million dollars in federal funding last year. Congress is now considering an increase in funding for the programs by $28 million next year. Despite all the spending, data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 3% spike in the teen birthrate after 15 years of steady decline.
A comprehensive sexual education program that incorporates education about contraceptives along with teaching the benefits of abstinence is the only way to effectively curb the spread of AIDS and teen pregnancy Additionally, a study commissioned by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy analyzed the effects of sexuality and HIV prevention programs and found that programs that include contraceptive education “do not hasten the onset of intercourse, do not increase the frequency of intercourse and do not increase the number of a person’s sexual partners.” In fact, the study implied the opposite — intercourse onset, frequency and number of sexual partners often decreased due to the program and when intercourse occurred, contraceptives were used more often.
So there is a logical reason why the distribution of condoms should be encouraged, supported and applauded. Feel free to retort via the Round Table or with me personally, but I would prefer it if you back your argument with something more valid than the bible.
Pseudo-disclaimer: This article is not an attack on religion, just on using the bible as the proper backing to a moral argument. So if anyone out there is going to yell at me for being anti-(insert religion), just cool your jets. This retort is dedicated to the memory of Jeff Harrison, who would have written it twice as well in four times as many words.
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